ReBarCamp Denver Here We Come

I’m off to Denver for REBARCAMP. I’ll be heading out of the desert a couple days early to get a chance to do some photography of something besides cactus, stucco and brown.

I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends I haven’t seen since REBLOGWORLD in Las Vegas last year. Meeting some in real life for the first time will be part of what makes the day complete. Hope to see a few Lab Rats there as well.

I’ll be leading a session there on HDR Processing of photos using Photomatix.

Before and After HDR

HDR More an Art Form than a set of Steps

HDR processing isn’t like using Photoshop. I liken HDR processing to “painting a color picture in a darkroom with only a bit of red light.”

You can’t really see what the finished image is going to look like till you hit “process” or in this analogy, “flip on the lights”

This is one of the reasons when you read tutorials about how to do HDR processing the instructions are so vague. Every image is different. There is no step 1, step 2, step 3, boom you have a great picture.

However, with practice your eye gets trained on what it will look like and you begin to learn if the light is here and the subject is this then these settings should work. LOL, and sometimes they do.

There are lots of ways to set a mood using HDR. Some prefer the gritty look, some over saturation. Others the almost watercolor pastel look. For Real Estate the closer to natural the better. When someone has to ask “Is that HDR?” you are getting good real estate images.

There are also lots of way to totally ruin the image and waste a lot of time with little results. Many people play with HDR and end up frustrated with the results and abandon using the process.

Most of the images here at the lab over the past 6 months have been run through the HDR process.

This is a topic that can’t be covered in a day let alone an hour. But a lot can be picked up in an hour to jump start anyone wanting to try their hand at HDR processing of their own images.

A fully functional copy of Photomatix is available on their site and there is no expiration date. There is a watermark placed on all images till the program is registered. You can run a batch process after registration to remove the watermark. This means play all you want and if you decide to purchase you don’t have to start over processing your images.

Using HDR software is like learning a new skill, it takes time, patience, and practice, practice, and more practice. You don’t really become an expert at HDR, you become a better student of what can be accomplished.

This is my task, to introduce a few people to possibilities in photo post processing with HDR.

I paid for my Photomix license about a month ago after envying @TBoard photos. I am still lost, but am starting to get a feel for it. I love the heavy saturation for street scenes of all the little towns around me. I have just started shooting listing photos with HDR in mind, so the that process is next for me. I think I would have made the trip to Denver just to get hands on instruction from you on this, oh well maybe next time.

I have to always say and remind people what HDR. High definition is when you make the image BIGGER and need to have more and better details. It also means better quality, but the main purpose is for bigger images,

If you compare hd vs digital in a 15 inch monitor, 50% of the people would think that digital is HD.

HD is for big screen tv’s and they just make images alot brighter, so bright that you should nearly always lower the quality.

I’m not sure what you are talking about, but it has nothing to do with HDR. Maybe I should explain. HDR is High Dynamic Range. It is a process of post processing an image so the full range of shadow and light becomes visible in the final image.

HDR usually involves a series of exposures from 3 to 9 images combined to make a single image. Those image exposures are spread out from dark to total over exposure to get the range needed to create the optimum exposure.

It has nothing to do with Television or HD signal. It has nothing to do with making images larger or clearer.